In the Beginning (Or At Least What Passes For It)

[Work in Progress]

 

“The bird that would soar above the level plan of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.” – Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“Most things break, including hearts. The lesions of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”- Wallace Stegner

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that n the process he does not become a monster. For when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”-Nietzsche

“Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. There is no longer a man among his fellow men, no longer a rational being speaking articulately to other rational beings…For in the end fear casts out even a man’s humanity.”-Aldous Huxley

 

In the Beginning (Or, At least, What Passes For It)

Like the brilliant, crazy, funny, cynical-as-hell Frank Zappa once said, “I never set out to be weird.” Sure, I guess that you could say having a Grandma who has millions of rabbit statuettes scattered across her lawn is a little out of the ordinary. And, of course, an overweight mother who gardens in her string bikini (in the dead of winter, no less) is not exactly the norm. Neither, let us not forget, is having a best friend who runs around in a kilt throwing giant logs (ah, those Scots, who believe that we like to see a man’s pale, hairy legs. )

Of course, many could argue that with a family like that, there was no hope for me being normal. Up North, people like us are called crazy, and seen as one step short of the loony bin. Down here, though, we are just called eccentric, and kept away from the family gatherings most of the time. Long ago, I accepted this was my life and I might as well make the best of it.

The sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon, washing out the blacks of the night and making everything seem uniformly grey. I sat out on the roof, smoking a cigarette and thinking, just as I had since about eight o’clock the night before when I’d crawled out here. Inside, my cell phone buzzed, its alarm set in the hope of the day before that I might sleep. Wishful thinking my best friend, and sometimes kilt-wearing musician, Kent would say. Nope, I’d answer, more of my mind realizing that if I don’t get some sleep soon, my body will completely shut down on me.

Crawling back inside to silence it, I flicked the cigarette butt out onto the roof and smashed it with my shoe, then tossed my battered, used copy of Junky onto my bed. When I picked up my phone, I was surprised to see that I had a half-dozen missed texts (mostly Kent) and two missed calls. Thinking back, I did remember hearing my phone go off during the night, but deciding to ignore it-mostly just because I hadn’t remembered to bring it outside with me, and didn’t want to crawl back inside to get it.

The first was my weekly call from Grandma. She held the phone that Granpa had bought her way too close, breathing heavily into the receiver and causing a fair amount of static to kick up whenever she moved it around. Her softly lilting voice, tinged with a Wiregrass twang, seemed louder, and there was an almost continual buzzing from her recently-acquired hearing aid: Hey Cecillia! It’s about eight forty-five. We were just calling to check on you, see how you were. Call us back. Love you! Bye-bye.

Making a mental note to drop by later- both to show them that I was, in fact, still alive, and hopefully for some pound cake that Grandma baked religiously every Thursday- I deleted the message and moved on. ‘

The smoke-scratchy voice of my boyfriend, Jess, greeted me next, his voice, as always, sounding even better over the phone: Hey, C, just wanted to see if you were ok. Haven’t heard from you in a couple of days. It’s about…nine thirty, so I guess that you’re asleep, but, uh, call me back when you can, kay? Ok. Bye, babygirl

Even though it was just now after six, I knew that he would be up, his bright blue eyes glowing in the light of his first cigarette of the day, his tangled blonde hair tangled around his shoulders from sleep. Jess, unlike so many before him, was the one who understood. He got how nuts my family was, and had seen the proof, but it didn’t bother him like it had his predecessor. He was the first to really take care of me, to love me. He also was one of Those Guys- the ones who desperately want to be somebody else. His hair was long, his lip was pierced, and he had a full back-piece tattoo. Like a modern day James Dean or a Henry Fonda, circa Easy Rider, he wanted to be a Rebel Without A Cause, a campaign strengthened by the biker jacket and steel-toed boots, but hindered by the Aeropostal and Abercrombie under said jacket.

He rolled his eyes at my William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, my Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin, and Social Distortion. He always laughed at my dead-on imitations of the jocks and cheerleaders who still haunted my classes, even in college. He sneered at my Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and my friends who spent all their free time playing Dungeons and Dragons. He was a little bit sweet, a little bit of a jerk, the smallest bit dangerous- but that is what made it all seem worthwhile.

An hour later, I sat on the kitchen floor, eyes glued on the SpongeBob rerun on TV, eatng a piece of cold pizza when Kent walks in.

“Hey, Cill, you ‘bout ready?” he asks, pulling a slice of pizza out of a box on the stove.

“Just ‘bout.” I replied, my eyes still glued to the screen. “This is the one where Squidward totally loses it ‘cause of the stupid stuffed animal machine.”

Kent sighed good-naturedly, and flipped the TV off. “Cill, I think that you’ve been watching too much SpongeBob.”

Crawling into the passenger’s seat of Kent’s car, I was thankful, yet again, that he drove us to school most of the time. While it has yet to be proven by some brain at Harvard or Yale, I was almost positive that driving in the deep South of Lower Alabama could be hazardous to your health- both physical and mental. Trivial things like turn signals or red lights were often ignored here, and often people parking took up two or three spots at a time. It was like some sick, twisted game: it’s time to play How Many Spots Can We Take Up!

While I fiddled with the radio dials- Kent was more of a “Christian rock” (an oxymoron that, in my opinion, was only eclipsed by “Christian rap”) guy while I was more of a classic rock person- Kent slid his hand up under the seat, producing a small, fuzzy beige teddy bear.

“I found her at the flea market last weekend. She was too cute not to take home.” He smiled, passing her over to me.

My brain did what I believe should be called “brain whip lash”: it ran forward, through all of the “appropriate” responses (aka, what Mom taught you to say to be polite), stopped briefly at “Aww, that’s so cute”, then reversed so fast that it almost felt it hit the back of my skull and reverberate.

“What the hell, Kent? I told you not to!” I yelled, while the mother-figure in my head slapped herself in the forehead and wondered where she had gone wrong.

For the last however many years that Kent and I had been friends, he had bought me a teddy bear. Neither of us could remember why this started, all that we knew was that now it was tradition. After Bear Number Twelve, though, I’d put my foot down: no more bears. I’d put all of them into storage except two-the first one that he had ever given me, called Snow White because of its fluffy white fur (even though, after twelve years it could be the lost eight dwarf, Grungy) and the black bear from last year. Kent reluctantly agreed to the arrangement, and I was fairly mad that he’d broken it.

Kent grinned goofily, “But she wanted me to buy her! She was calling out for me!” his voice switched to a high squeaky falsetto, “Kent! Buy me, Kent! Cil will love my cuddliness, Kent!”

Rolling my eyes, I put the bear on the seat beside me, “Kent, have you been skipping your meds again? ‘Cause when the teddy bears start talking to you, that’s really when I start to worry.”

There was another agreement that Kent and I had: I could listen to whatever I wanted, just as long as I didn’t sing along to Queen. After the third straight day that I bumbled my way through “Fat Bottomed Girls”, Kent had put that rule into effect. But today we were in luck: I knew all the words to “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

“Gah, Cil! Make it stop!”

“I see a little sillhouetto of a man. Scaramouch, Scaramouch, will you do the fandango? Thunderbolts and lightening, very, very frightening! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo, Figaro! Magnificoo-oo-oo!”

“Really, Cill, do you want me to wreck?”

”I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me. He’s just a poor boy, from a poor family, spare him his life from this monstrosity.”

“ Cill, really, I’ll stop with the bears!”

“Easy come, easy go, will you let me go? Ismilla, no! We will not let you go! Let me go! Ismilla, we will not let you go! Let me go! Never let you go! Let him go!”

“Don’t care what you say, Cillia. Totally worth it.”

Despite the fact that it was just after eight (also known, more popularly, as “oh, god, why do these classes have to start so damn early” o’clock) the lot was mostly full when Kent pulled n. He hurried off to his Art lecture while I went in search of the college kid’s Holy Grail- hot, hot, strong coffee that will possibly keep you awake through yet another interminable Trig lecture. Possibly.

Back in high school, all of the cliques had their own meeting places. Maybe it was under the bleachers (Future Potheads of America), the front steps (Future Fascists of America, aka, the Preps), or the back steps to the quad (Freaks, Geeks, and Exiles). College, despite what everyone says, is no different. The smokers sat outside next to the loading docks, where- in the immortal words of Prince- there was a perpetual Purple Haze. Jocks, of course, had the weight room. Preps had the couches crowded around the flats screen TV in the Student Center. The pseudo-intellectuals had the tiled coffee shop-like atmosphere convieniently located in front of the rip-off Starbucks. My people (again, the Freaks, Geeks, and Exiles who are just realizing that they will soon own all of the people who have thus far made their lives a living hell) had the rec room: a collection of pool tables always missing balls, high tables where you got hit with a pool cue if you sat, couches that were only marginally comfortable, and an air hockey table usually just filled with textbooks and bags.

The front pool table was crowded with the almost never-ending group of Magic players (By the way, in case you didn’t know: Magic is a card game that is kind of the bastard love child of Pokemon, D and D, and a really bad acid trip. Yeah, I don’t get it either.) that changed throughout the day, but in very subtle ways so that you would never notice unless you were really paying attention.

Throwing my bags carelessly onto the air hockey table, I walked over, slipping into a chair beside my friend Mose. His thick biceps bulged as he looked over his cards, glancing my way fleetingly to acknowledge my prescence. I pointed to a brightly colored card, “Play her, she’s pretty!” I joked. Although the guys had offered multiple times to teach me how to play Magic, I’d always refused, staying- at least in my mind- blissfully ignorant.

“Tap three. Gain two life.” His opponent, Jacob, said, smiling and glancing at the clock. “Crap! Chem test in five minutes.” Hastily he began throwing his books and cards into his bag.

“Just remember, Jake.” I call after him, “If you get stuck, the answer is always 42.”

“Unless Griffin turned into a huge fan of Douglas Adams overnight, I doubt he’ll be amused.” He replied, turning and attempting to tap dance, Fred Astair-style. “So long, so long, and thanks for all the fish!”

Mose smiles and puts a brotherly arm around me. “So, how are you today, Cecillia? It’s good to hear you laugh again.”

I rock my hand back and forth, “Eh..comme ce, comme ca. I have my good days and my bad days.” Looking around, I spot the familiar blue cap in the crowd at the table farthest away from the door and feel that old, familiar feeling, a sensation of simultaneous hot and cold that ran down my breastbone into my stomach, making it knot up. My face flushed hot, then cold, and suddenly felt clammy, my arms breaking into goosebumps and needles pricking the scar running the length of my left arm. It will be a year in May, yet my body still reacted primally with fear.

Mose was smiling- I guess that he’s said something and I hoped he didn’t expect a response. Looking for a quick way out, I looked up at the clock. “Shoot! Trig lecture in five minutes!”

The one good thing about Trig, in general, is that you have to focus because it’s so complicated. If you zone out, contemplating your problems even for a second, more often than not you’ve lost an essential part of some problem and, therefore, are lost for the rest of the lecture. The other, more specific, good thing about Trig is my teacher: a huge German named Krausfielt who was as tall as the door, wears jeans and sandals to class, and ends every other sentence with “Ja?” Heck yes.

Grandma and Granpa had lived in the dame house for the majority of the fifty-some odd years that they had been married: a huge two story with a backyard littered with hundreds of rabbit statuettes, and the turtle-shaped pool that my older brother Jayson and I had splashed in as toddlers.

Almost before I even ring the doorbell, Grandma flings open the door and pulls me into a rib-crushing hug. She overlooks (probably on purpose) the red streaks that I had given myself a few days before and ushers me into the kitchen where Ms. Hooper- one of her oldest friends- sits sipping a glass of tea.

“Well, Cecillia!” she booms in her deep, raspy voice. “You just get prettier every time that I see you!” she stands, a huge woman who makes people sit up and take notice. She is six foot two if she is an inch, and her clothes- a black cardigan over Day-Glo green stretch pants- draws your attention if all else failed. I gave her the obligatory hug, which was how I had greeted all of Grandma’s friends since birth, and smiled.

Grandma sits down, “There’s pound cake on the counter, Cecillia.” She says, motioning to her glass cake plate. While Grandma and Ms. Hooper resume their conversation, I fix a plate and some milk.

“I’ll tell you, Theresa, if I had a penny for every time that Jane Masters gave an excuse not to help with the Christmas dinner, I would be a very rich woman.” Ms. Hooper’s spoon clinks the side of her coffee cup as she speaks.

“You’re coming to the Christmas dinner, aren’t you, Cecillia?” Grandma asks over her shoulder.

Every December, their church threw a holiday party in the high school’s gym. There was food and mistletoe, pony and sleigh rides, a live Nativity scene and a Santa Claus. It was all so cutesy that it made me want to throw up- or at least throw something. Since Jayson was born, Grandma had dragged the family to it. After Jay turned thirteen, he refused to go and Mom, claiming that she was slammed with her classed, beggared off, too. But, even if just to make Grandma and Granpa happy, I’d continued going every year.

“Of course, Grandma.” I smile.

Ms. Hooper grins like an adult who believes she is so “hip” and “in the know” about the doings of teenagers. “I know that Charlie will be so glad to see you, Cecillia.”

Charlie Manson (yes, go ahead and laugh, everyone else does) was one of the most vile, creepy boys that I had ever met. He was also Ms. Hooper’s grandson. Ever since I was a year old and he was six months, we had been pushed together; and, ever since I could toddle, I had stayed as far away from him as I could. Puberty had given him long black hair that reminded me of an oil slick and looked like it ate combs, as well as sallow skin that seemed to ooze grease. His breath, no matter how many breath mints he swallowed, could strip furniture. He referred to girls as “chicks” and usually addressed them as either “babe” or “sweet thang” (yes, you read that right, that’s “thang” spelled with an “a” which, to most of us, is even more offensive). And, at every single holiday function, he stuck to me, trying to paw me on the sleigh ride, at Palm Sunday, at the Easter egg hunt, working at Vacation Bible School. The boy was utterly relentless and didn’t take a hint.

Despite all of this, though, I did what Mom, Grandma, and various aunts had drilled into me since I could speak: I acted like a lady. “And I’m so happy that I will get to see him, too, Ms. Hooper.”


















[Work in Progress]

 

“The bird that would soar above the level plan of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.” – Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“Most things break, including hearts. The lesions of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”- Wallace Stegner

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that n the process he does not become a monster. For when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”-Nietzsche

“Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. There is no longer a man among his fellow men, no longer a rational being speaking articulately to other rational beings…For in the end fear casts out even a man’s humanity.”-Aldous Huxley

 

In the Beginning (Or, At least, What Passes For It)

Like the brilliant, crazy, funny, cynical-as-hell Frank Zappa once said, “I never set out to be weird.” Sure, I guess that you could say having a Grandma who has millions of rabbit statuettes scattered across her lawn is a little out of the ordinary. And, of course, an overweight mother who gardens in her string bikini (in the dead of winter, no less) is not exactly the norm. Neither, let us not forget, is having a best friend who runs around in a kilt throwing giant logs (ah, those Scots, who believe that we like to see a man’s pale, hairy legs. )

Of course, many could argue that with a family like that, there was no hope for me being normal. Up North, people like us are called crazy, and seen as one step short of the loony bin. Down here, though, we are just called eccentric, and kept away from the family gatherings most of the time. Long ago, I accepted this was my life and I might as well make the best of it.

The sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon, washing out the blacks of the night and making everything seem uniformly grey. I sat out on the roof, smoking a cigarette and thinking, just as I had since about eight o’clock the night before when I’d crawled out here. Inside, my cell phone buzzed, its alarm set in the hope of the day before that I might sleep. Wishful thinking my best friend, and sometimes kilt-wearing musician, Kent would say. Nope, I’d answer, more of my mind realizing that if I don’t get some sleep soon, my body will completely shut down on me.

Crawling back inside to silence it, I flicked the cigarette butt out onto the roof and smashed it with my shoe, then tossed my battered, used copy of Junky onto my bed. When I picked up my phone, I was surprised to see that I had a half-dozen missed texts (mostly Kent) and two missed calls. Thinking back, I did remember hearing my phone go off during the night, but deciding to ignore it-mostly just because I hadn’t remembered to bring it outside with me, and didn’t want to crawl back inside to get it.

The first was my weekly call from Grandma. She held the phone that Granpa had bought her way too close, breathing heavily into the receiver and causing a fair amount of static to kick up whenever she moved it around. Her softly lilting voice, tinged with a Wiregrass twang, seemed louder, and there was an almost continual buzzing from her recently-acquired hearing aid: Hey Cecillia! It’s about eight forty-five. We were just calling to check on you, see how you were. Call us back. Love you! Bye-bye.

Making a mental note to drop by later- both to show them that I was, in fact, still alive, and hopefully for some pound cake that Grandma baked religiously every Thursday- I deleted the message and moved on. ‘

The smoke-scratchy voice of my boyfriend, Jess, greeted me next, his voice, as always, sounding even better over the phone: Hey, C, just wanted to see if you were ok. Haven’t heard from you in a couple of days. It’s about…nine thirty, so I guess that you’re asleep, but, uh, call me back when you can, kay? Ok. Bye, babygirl

Even though it was just now after six, I knew that he would be up, his bright blue eyes glowing in the light of his first cigarette of the day, his tangled blonde hair tangled around his shoulders from sleep. Jess, unlike so many before him, was the one who understood. He got how nuts my family was, and had seen the proof, but it didn’t bother him like it had his predecessor. He was the first to really take care of me, to love me. He also was one of Those Guys- the ones who desperately want to be somebody else. His hair was long, his lip was pierced, and he had a full back-piece tattoo. Like a modern day James Dean or a Henry Fonda, circa Easy Rider, he wanted to be a Rebel Without A Cause, a campaign strengthened by the biker jacket and steel-toed boots, but hindered by the Aeropostal and Abercrombie under said jacket.

He rolled his eyes at my William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, my Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin, and Social Distortion. He always laughed at my dead-on imitations of the jocks and cheerleaders who still haunted my classes, even in college. He sneered at my Mike’s Hard Lemonade, and my friends who spent all their free time playing Dungeons and Dragons. He was a little bit sweet, a little bit of a jerk, the smallest bit dangerous- but that is what made it all seem worthwhile.

An hour later, I sat on the kitchen floor, eyes glued on the SpongeBob rerun on TV, eatng a piece of cold pizza when Kent walks in.

“Hey, Cill, you ‘bout ready?” he asks, pulling a slice of pizza out of a box on the stove.

“Just ‘bout.” I replied, my eyes still glued to the screen. “This is the one where Squidward totally loses it ‘cause of the stupid stuffed animal machine.”

Kent sighed good-naturedly, and flipped the TV off. “Cill, I think that you’ve been watching too much SpongeBob.”

Crawling into the passenger’s seat of Kent’s car, I was thankful, yet again, that he drove us to school most of the time. While it has yet to be proven by some brain at Harvard or Yale, I was almost positive that driving in the deep South of Lower Alabama could be hazardous to your health- both physical and mental. Trivial things like turn signals or red lights were often ignored here, and often people parking took up two or three spots at a time. It was like some sick, twisted game: it’s time to play How Many Spots Can We Take Up!

While I fiddled with the radio dials- Kent was more of a “Christian rock” (an oxymoron that, in my opinion, was only eclipsed by “Christian rap”) guy while I was more of a classic rock person- Kent slid his hand up under the seat, producing a small, fuzzy beige teddy bear.

“I found her at the flea market last weekend. She was too cute not to take home.” He smiled, passing her over to me.

My brain did what I believe should be called “brain whip lash”: it ran forward, through all of the “appropriate” responses (aka, what Mom taught you to say to be polite), stopped briefly at “Aww, that’s so cute”, then reversed so fast that it almost felt it hit the back of my skull and reverberate.

“What the hell, Kent? I told you not to!” I yelled, while the mother-figure in my head slapped herself in the forehead and wondered where she had gone wrong.

For the last however many years that Kent and I had been friends, he had bought me a teddy bear. Neither of us could remember why this started, all that we knew was that now it was tradition. After Bear Number Twelve, though, I’d put my foot down: no more bears. I’d put all of them into storage except two-the first one that he had ever given me, called Snow White because of its fluffy white fur (even though, after twelve years it could be the lost eight dwarf, Grungy) and the black bear from last year. Kent reluctantly agreed to the arrangement, and I was fairly mad that he’d broken it.

Kent grinned goofily, “But she wanted me to buy her! She was calling out for me!” his voice switched to a high squeaky falsetto, “Kent! Buy me, Kent! Cil will love my cuddliness, Kent!”

Rolling my eyes, I put the bear on the seat beside me, “Kent, have you been skipping your meds again? ‘Cause when the teddy bears start talking to you, that’s really when I start to worry.”

There was another agreement that Kent and I had: I could listen to whatever I wanted, just as long as I didn’t sing along to Queen. After the third straight day that I bumbled my way through “Fat Bottomed Girls”, Kent had put that rule into effect. But today we were in luck: I knew all the words to “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

“Gah, Cil! Make it stop!”

“I see a little sillhouetto of a man. Scaramouch, Scaramouch, will you do the fandango? Thunderbolts and lightening, very, very frightening! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo! Galileo, Figaro! Magnificoo-oo-oo!”

“Really, Cill, do you want me to wreck?”

”I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me. He’s just a poor boy, from a poor family, spare him his life from this monstrosity.”

“ Cill, really, I’ll stop with the bears!”

“Easy come, easy go, will you let me go? Ismilla, no! We will not let you go! Let me go! Ismilla, we will not let you go! Let me go! Never let you go! Let him go!”

“Don’t care what you say, Cillia. Totally worth it.”

Despite the fact that it was just after eight (also known, more popularly, as “oh, god, why do these classes have to start so damn early” o’clock) the lot was mostly full when Kent pulled n. He hurried off to his Art lecture while I went in search of the college kid’s Holy Grail- hot, hot, strong coffee that will possibly keep you awake through yet another interminable Trig lecture. Possibly.

Back in high school, all of the cliques had their own meeting places. Maybe it was under the bleachers (Future Potheads of America), the front steps (Future Fascists of America, aka, the Preps), or the back steps to the quad (Freaks, Geeks, and Exiles). College, despite what everyone says, is no different. The smokers sat outside next to the loading docks, where- in the immortal words of Prince- there was a perpetual Purple Haze. Jocks, of course, had the weight room. Preps had the couches crowded around the flats screen TV in the Student Center. The pseudo-intellectuals had the tiled coffee shop-like atmosphere convieniently located in front of the rip-off Starbucks. My people (again, the Freaks, Geeks, and Exiles who are just realizing that they will soon own all of the people who have thus far made their lives a living hell) had the rec room: a collection of pool tables always missing balls, high tables where you got hit with a pool cue if you sat, couches that were only marginally comfortable, and an air hockey table usually just filled with textbooks and bags.

The front pool table was crowded with the almost never-ending group of Magic players (By the way, in case you didn’t know: Magic is a card game that is kind of the bastard love child of Pokemon, D and D, and a really bad acid trip. Yeah, I don’t get it either.) that changed throughout the day, but in very subtle ways so that you would never notice unless you were really paying attention.

Throwing my bags carelessly onto the air hockey table, I walked over, slipping into a chair beside my friend Mose. His thick biceps bulged as he looked over his cards, glancing my way fleetingly to acknowledge my prescence. I pointed to a brightly colored card, “Play her, she’s pretty!” I joked. Although the guys had offered multiple times to teach me how to play Magic, I’d always refused, staying- at least in my mind- blissfully ignorant.

“Tap three. Gain two life.” His opponent, Jacob, said, smiling and glancing at the clock. “Crap! Chem test in five minutes.” Hastily he began throwing his books and cards into his bag.

“Just remember, Jake.” I call after him, “If you get stuck, the answer is always 42.”

“Unless Griffin turned into a huge fan of Douglas Adams overnight, I doubt he’ll be amused.” He replied, turning and attempting to tap dance, Fred Astair-style. “So long, so long, and thanks for all the fish!”

Mose smiles and puts a brotherly arm around me. “So, how are you today, Cecillia? It’s good to hear you laugh again.”

I rock my hand back and forth, “Eh..comme ce, comme ca. I have my good days and my bad days.” Looking around, I spot the familiar blue cap in the crowd at the table farthest away from the door and feel that old, familiar feeling, a sensation of simultaneous hot and cold that ran down my breastbone into my stomach, making it knot up. My face flushed hot, then cold, and suddenly felt clammy, my arms breaking into goosebumps and needles pricking the scar running the length of my left arm. It will be a year in May, yet my body still reacted primally with fear.

Mose was smiling- I guess that he’s said something and I hoped he didn’t expect a response. Looking for a quick way out, I looked up at the clock. “Shoot! Trig lecture in five minutes!”

The one good thing about Trig, in general, is that you have to focus because it’s so complicated. If you zone out, contemplating your problems even for a second, more often than not you’ve lost an essential part of some problem and, therefore, are lost for the rest of the lecture. The other, more specific, good thing about Trig is my teacher: a huge German named Krausfielt, who is almost as tall as the door, wears jeans and sandles to class, says everything three times, and ends every other sentence with "Ja?" Heck yes.